Go raibh maith agat cathaoirleach. Firstly, I would like to thank the Joint Committee for inviting CATU to give a witness submission on this legislation. CATU, the Community Action Tenants Union, is the largest organised body of tenants in Ireland, representing thousands of members in more than 30 branches island-wide. We empower tenants and working-class communities to organise, to improve their material conditions, both in the immediate sense and through longer-term systemic change. For far too long, the voices of landlords and developers have been the loudest in the room. Our presence here today is a small but important step towards changing that.
The perspective we bring is grounded in first-hand experience in the day-to-day realities faced by our members. The effects of the continued reliance on the private market and the commodification of housing is, in our view, directly leading to the national housing emergency we find ourselves in. Government policy continues to attempt a balance between the interests of property developers and landlords, whose priority is profit, and the interests of tenants, whose priority is safe, secure, and affordable housing. While there are elements of the proposed legislation that we welcome, such as the universal application of Rent Pressure Zones (RPZs) across all 26 counties and the introduction of a Rent Price Register, we believe this legislation continues that flawed approach. We also believe elements of this bill risk generating a whole new set of problems.
Expanding RPZs is a starting point, but this is the bare minimum. What is needed is a significant and immediate reduction in rents. Many of our members are paying up to and exceeding 60% of their income just to keep a roof over their head — money that should be circulating through local shops, services, and communities rather than being extracted into the pockets of developers, investment funds, and landlords. Some of our members who are in what would be considered “good jobs”, permanent public jobs, are forced to work a second job at night to make the rent. It is often said that the RPZ rules proposed in this legislation limit rents, but in fact they essentially guarantee a landlord the ability to increase rent annually, even if only by the 2% figure.
CATU welcomes the proposal to strengthen security of tenure for tenants of large landlords. We understand from our Eviction Nation report, which has been presented to the Housing Agency, that landlords with multiple properties carry out the vast majority of evictions in Ireland. CATU believes that an eviction ban must be extended to protect all tenants equally, without confusing exceptions. Evictions are the main cause of ever-rising homeless figures, which exceeded 16,500 at the end of last month. Without an eviction ban, CATU remains sceptical of the government’s attempt to limit the ability for landlords to evict.
CATU members are noticing a significant increase in eviction notices in the South, across different types of landlords, but particularly corporate landlords. Members of the committee are probably aware of the vulture fund LRC Group which is currently attempting to evict 14 families in Killarney. Similarly LRC has been evicting households in Dublin and Cork.
We believe this wave of evictions — up 35% on the same period last year — corresponds to landlords trying to get ahead of new RPZ legislation, and bring in new tenants who will be under the new rule system, resetting the tenancy to market rent. It is a problem in this legislation that multiple types of tenancies are effectively now in place, with no eviction ban protecting tenants from landlords skirting the rules. This wave of evictions has hit members receiving HAP payments particularly hard. Several families in our Dublin branches who are in receipt of HAP are currently facing eviction. All of these families are single parent families. Where are they supposed to go? How has a situation been allowed to develop where the Government has paid significant amounts of public money directly to landlords, and those landlords can still evict those families into homelessness and flip the house. At a bare minimum CATU recommends that any landlord in receipt of HAP, a public subsidy, should be banned from issuing a no-fault eviction notice.
In Stillorgan, we have seen LRC Group evict tenants, then leave the homes empty, presumably to facilitate them to re-set the rent in March. The rents for new tenants in this estate, Whately Place, have already increased by nearly 70% over the past 5 years, showing the enormous profits that can be generated through these types of strategies.
Under the new legislation, landlords are only meant to be able to increase rents above the 2% limit where tenants have left voluntarily or there’s been a breach of contract, but there’s no enforcement mechanisms in place to ensure that happens. It will be up to tenants to report, requiring them to know the rent paid by previous tenants and the grounds on which they were evicted.
If we take the case of LRC Group in Stillorgan, how will a tenant who moves in in March at a massively inflated rent know what the previously evicted tenant was paying or the grounds on which they were evicted?
International research from a variety of different countries shows that deregulation of rent controls in cases of tenant turnover inevitably leads to huge increases in economic evictions, as landlords seek to profit from the ability to reset the rent when a tenant leaves. According to examples seen in other cities, landlords may harass tenants into leaving through poor maintenance or intimidation, or provide ‘cash-for-keys’ payments to incentivise them to give up their home. None of these eventualities are sufficiently accounted for in the proposed legislation.
The rule around a landlord’s ability to reset rents to what is referred to as market rent in between tenancies and after 6 years, is in the eyes of our members, an extremely damaging and arbitrary concept that will make it harder for someone to leave homelessness and will exacerbate overcrowding. It will have a very damaging effect on students who need to move to take up college places. Market-rent bears no relation to median income. Rents in Ireland are already some of the highest in Europe. In Galway, for example, rents have rocketed over 75% in the past 5 years, made worse by the proliferation of illegal short-term lets and holiday homes.
Lastly, we disagree with core assumptions underpinning the new legislation – that we need to attract institutional investment for the supply of new build-to-rent accommodation, and that this will lead to lower rents. There’s no guarantee this rent decrease will occur. Over the past several years, there has been enormous consolidation of ownership of the rental market through the growth of institutional investment and corporate landlords, and this has not led to reduced rents. Instead, our own research shows, corporate landlords are the most prolific evictors in the country, as per our Eviction Nation report. Research by the Central Bank shows that corporate landlords increase rents at a significantly higher rate than their smaller scale counterparts.
What is needed is a reorientation of housing policy towards the provision of high quality public housing, alongside proper resourcing of in-house maintenance and investment in the existing public housing stock.
CATU recommends a policy of universal public housing as outlined in our UPH Manifesto, meaning abolishing the income caps for access to social housing so it is available to anyone who wants it, with rent charged as a proportion of income.
Tenants’ unions are essential for the safeguarding of rights of workers in this country and we thank the committee for the opportunity to represent our members.